Four shots fired in rapid succession went off beside him.
Maya’s nine-millimeter bucked in her hands as she appeared on Jerry’s right, another hippie beside her who slipped Jerry’s arm around his neck and began moving the big man back up the tunnel. Bodies sprawled and moans bounded down the hall as Maya emptied her clip into the horde, slowly backing up. A stray who escaped her bullets galloped at her over the fallen bodies.
Maya jerked the ice climber pick from her belt and spiked the stray’s head.
She reloaded the pistol and fought a rear guard action, always backing up as the last of the refugees and Big Jerry entered the fantail.
• • •
M
argaret realized with a sick, sinking feeling that things had just gotten worse, as she saw the refugees spilling through the hatch: the sick, a pregnant woman, people too scared to even hold a weapon, lots of children. They scattered and tried to hide behind equipment and spare engines, and the dead began hunting them at once.
She spotted Clyde and another man, both carrying lengths of chains, and waved them on. If they could just seal the openings, they might have a chance to wipe out the remaining creatures inside the sprawling room. Margaret fell back toward the refugees, pumping and firing, stopping to reload, firing some more. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Maya wedging a length of pipe through the wheel of the hatch they had all come through, Jerry leaning on a wall next to her and reloading his shotgun.
A man’s scream echoed from deeper in the space.
A woman’s high wailing sounded to her right.
Margaret and those around her fired.
There was more screaming on the right. She saw the pregnant woman’s husband with a pipe wrench, bashing the head of a corpse. Gunfire was suddenly replaced by silence followed by shrieking, and an oxygen bottle with a slender, bloody palm print on it rolled by. Corpses galloped at her and she pulled the trigger, working the shotgun’s slide, blowing off a head, an arm, ripping open a belly.
We were safer on the water,
she thought, tears in her eyes.
Clyde staggered out from behind a forklift holding a fistful of chain, his clothes bloody, a dead sailor close behind him. “Clyde, over here,” Margaret shouted, turning to blast a blond sailor in oily coveralls. A hand gripped her shoulder and the Asian woman turned to see that Clyde’s eyes were gray and cloudy, his throat red ribbons of flesh. Margaret’s scream was cut short as he fell upon her.
Maya saw it all, saw it coming apart. Hippies went down, Larraine was dragged away screaming, and her husband flailed his arms weakly beneath a pile of ripping and snarling creatures. Then Margaret fell. Near an engine test mount, Sophia had a screaming child by the arm as a zombie tried to pull the boy away by his legs, the woman’s mouth open in a scream Maya couldn’t hear.
The deaf girl charged and shot the creature in the face, and Sophia gathered the boy to her chest. Looking around frantically, Maya spotted a hatch twenty feet away, open, with nothing coming out of it. She ran to Jerry, slapped him on the shoulder, and pointed to the hatch, making a gathering gesture. The big man nodded and roared for everyone to get to the opening.
Maya shot at the corpses closest to her, thinking that no one would move; they would remain huddled where they were, frozen and unthinking until they were torn apart. But they did move, and quickly. Women grabbed kids by shirt collars, tucked the smaller ones under their arms, and ran for the hatch. The pregnant couple reunited, and Big Jerry hobbled as fast as he was able.
When Maya’s pistol clicked empty, she switched to the ice pick, swinging, kicking a twitching corpse away, swinging again. When Big Jerry raised his swollen knee to clear the hatch, Maya broke away and headed for it at a sprint.
She almost made it.
The Cadillac was heavy, made of quality Detroit steel. But it wasn’t a tank, and it was coming apart.
From the outside it was barely recognizable for what it had been. Every bit of glass was cracked or broken, bent chrome twisted away like stray hairs; the once-white paint job was now red, streaked with green and yellow, and the metal surfaces were hammered like a Mexican copper plate. It rattled on one flat tire, the alignment was out of whack, and the engine knocked.
Vlad ignored the car’s condition and poured it on, swerving the wheel left and right, fighting for gaps among the stumbling dead. They banged off the remaining front fender—the other was long gone—and rolled beneath the undercarriage, broken hands grasping at hot pipes and spinning wheels. Ben was a tiny ball shivering against Vlad’s ribs. The man’s jaw ached from clenching his teeth.
They had made it off the pier, down the access road, and survived the streets that marched alongside vacant hangars and buildings.
Vladimir and Ben had reached the airfield.
The pilot floored the accelerator and shot across the tarmac, honking the weak-sounding horn and waving his left arm out the shattered driver’s-side window, shouting in Russian. It got their attention. The dead followed.
The pilot stayed clear of the helicopter, wanting them nowhere near the aircraft, and shot out to the far end of the airfield before stopping. He didn’t dare turn off the engine for fear it would object to its punishment by refusing to turn over. Now Vlad waited and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke out the window.
“Those are bad for you,” said Ben, looking up at him and waving a hand in front of his face. “They’re stinky.”
Vladimir nodded solemnly and flicked the butt out the window. “It is a dirty habit. Will you help me to stop?”
“Yes,” Ben said as he climbed to his knees on the seat. “Are we going home now?”
The Russian hugged him close. “Soon, little one,” he said. He watched the dead through the starred windshield. There were thousands of them, flowing across the cracked, weed-infested concrete, every shape and size, and in every phase of decomposition. He couldn’t hear them moaning over the rattling of the engine, but he knew they were.
He let them draw closer.
“Am I going with Mommy and Daddy?” Ben asked.
Vlad cradled the boy’s head in one oversized hand and held it against his side. “If you do, I will be going with you.”
The Russian gave them close to twenty minutes, and as waves of California’s dead shuffled and dragged themselves closer to the Cadillac, he stepped on the gas. This time he swung far to the left, away from them and picking up speed before he cut back, aiming the space where the hood ornament had once been at the distant Black Hawk. Now his foot sank to the floor, and bodies that turned slowly in his direction blurred by.
A Sikorsky UH-60A was not a car, and one did not simply jump in, turn a key, and fly away. It was a detail most people didn’t appreciate but one that helicopter pilots knew without even thinking about it. There was a startup process, and mathematics tumbled through Vladimir’s head as he raced toward the aircraft. He didn’t like the outcomes that kept repeating.
The Cadillac coughed and a sharp, metallic
PING
made the whole vehicle jump. Black smoke streamed from beneath the hood, coating the windshield with oil and forcing Vladimir to stick his head out the side window in order to see. He held the accelerator down, no longer caring what it did to the engine. They were out of time.
The dead trudged steadily after.
A hundred yards away now . . . seventy-five . . . fifty. The Caddy’s engine shifted from knocking to outright hammering, a high-speed knock that made the vehicle shudder. They were twenty-five yards away when an explosive
BANG
shot a piston through the Cadillac’s wrinkled hood like a bullet. Power failed, the steering wheel locked, and then they were coasting, slowing rapidly.
As they neared the chopper, Vlad jammed the emergency brake down with his foot, and the Cadillac stuttered to a halt, never to move again under its own power. The pilot tucked Ben under an arm and ran to his bird, buckling the boy into the co-pilot’s seat. As he snapped himself in on the left, he didn’t bother to look out the windscreen. He knew what was coming.
Vlad switched on the fuel valve, then depressed the starter and the counter at the same time, his eyes on the N1, the gauge for the gas producer turbine. The Black Hawk was cold and had limited battery power. He would have two chances at most to start the turbines, and after that the bird wouldn’t have enough juice to start without an external battery cart, and there was no helpful ground crew standing by at the moment.
The Russian watched the gauge and told himself not to look outside. It wouldn’t matter anyway; this would work or it wouldn’t. He peeked, and realized that battery power or not, if the first attempt failed, he would never have time to make a second.
The corpses he had originally led away with Maxie’s Cadillac were coming, but most were still some distance away. They weren’t the problem, and this was immediately apparent. The dead weren’t moving as a single mass; they were strewn across the airfield, all at different distances from the helicopter, and some had been so far back that they didn’t cover enough ground to be drawn away. They were closer, and coming toward the meal they had just seen climb aboard. In addition, new arrivals were walking out from between the hangars by the dozens, the hundreds, closer than those he had led away.
“That wasn’t much of a plan,” he muttered.
Cold-starting the turbine took about thirty-five seconds. At twenty-five percent on the N1 gauge, the rotor blades should start turning. The seconds ticked by on the counter. Vlad had flown into Alameda on vapors. He wondered if he had enough fuel left in the lines to even start the turbines, much less do what he intended.
Twenty seconds. Twenty-five.
The dead came closer, enough so that he could make out their twisted features.
Overhead the turbines began to whine, quickly becoming painfully loud. It wouldn’t mean anything if the fuel ran out. He pulled a pair of ear protectors from the back of the co-pilot’s seat and placed them on Ben’s head to shield him from the noise. The little boy was too small to see out the windows, to see what was coming, and he patted the protectors, gigantic on his head, and laughed.
The rotors began to turn.
Vlad released the starter and saw the N1 gauge creep past thirty percent. He watched the temperature on both turbines as they spooled up and heated the engine and lubricating oils. It would take another full minute before they would be hot enough to give him green lights, and attempting to lift off in any other condition would almost certainly cause mechanical seizing and an instant crash. The timer clicked steadily, and to him it sounded like approaching footfalls. He was careful to increase his RPMs slowly, because if he overheated the turbines, it was over.
Although the tail rotor was humming nicely, the fifty-three-foot-diameter rotor blades turned ponderously. Considering the noise they made, they didn’t move nearly fast enough.
The N1 gauge reached seventy percent, and Vladimir turned on the generator and started flicking overhead switches to power his many electrical systems. At once he was assaulted by a barrage of buzzers, horns, and flashing red lights.
The fuel gauge showed one flickering red bar.
Something bumped against the aircraft’s tail boom. Vladimir gritted his teeth, wanting to draw his pistol, knowing he couldn’t. He needed his hands now. Another thump, and then he felt something climb into the troop compartment just as his temperature gauges turned green. He prayed for lift as he hauled on the cyclic and collective. The Black Hawk’s wheels left the pavement, rising up and forward.
The zombie was wearing a chef’s uniform that had been starched white a long time ago but was now a mottled brown. Just as the chopper lifted off, it tried to stand and lost what little balance it possessed, tumbling out the troop compartment door and hitting the tarmac, shattering both legs.
Vlad didn’t see it, but when neither he nor Ben was attacked after a few moments, he had to assume the zombie was gone. He took the Black Hawk up to twenty-five feet and accelerated over the heads of the swarming dead, now packing the old airfield, the beat of his rotors blowing the unsteady ones off their feet. Groundhog-7’s nose was fixed on the west end of the field, out where the pavement led to weeds, a fence, and then the water.
They were going to go nose-in right at the fence, Vlad knew it. Or they would clear it only to fall into the bay. Somehow the chopper stayed airborne.
Ben, who had never flown before, stared at the pilot with a child’s wide-eyed amazement, completely without fear. He laughed and clapped his hands.
Vladimir laughed too, but it came out as a hoarse shriek. He climbed as quickly as he dared, water passing below. Groundhog-7 was now “feet-wet,” the term used by pilots to indicate they had left land behind and were now over water. Vlad tried for as much altitude as possible, needing at least a hundred feet to clear the carrier’s deck. His pilot’s mind quickly calculated airspeed against the half mile to the carrier. Fifteen seconds.
The lone, flickering fuel bar winked out.
Vladimir felt the abruptly starved turbines react the only way they could.
Xavier had followed the yelling when he could, but the blood trail was better, a spattering of small, wet red dots on the steel decking, leading him onward. Brother Peter was wounded. He went through the hatch and entered the hangar bay, catching movement far to the left. There he saw Brother Peter take something off a corpse, pull half of it out of an elevator, and then jump inside just as the red doors closed.
The priest ran.
He reached the elevator, saw the key card reader, and recognized the color of the doors for what it represented. The minister had found a way to the magazines, and he had taken the only way to operate the elevator with him. Xavier wanted to cry out, to curse, to scream.
He took a deep breath. In almost every place he had ever been, elevators had stairs nearby. He looked at the red-painted hatch off to the side and guessed it had to lead to stairs, as it was the only other object around that color. Then he saw the lock plate and keyhole. Of course it would be secured, just like the elevator.
A moan echoed through the hangar. The priest didn’t even look. He grabbed the severed upper torso of the ordnance sailor, now with its head flattened, and flipped it onto its back, tearing at its jersey. It stood to reason that if the young man had an access card—there it was, a heavy key connected to his dog tag chain. He snapped it off and ran to the door.
It opened at once, revealing a stairwell lit with red battle lights. Xavier started down.
• • •
T
he magazine was well lit, as Brother Peter would have expected. Turn off the ice cream machine and the lights in the john, shut down TVs and air conditioners, but keep the systems essential for war fully functional. It made sense.
The aircraft carrier’s magazine was composed of numerous chambers located off a wide, central hall, each secured by a thick, blast-resistant steel door. There was dried blood down here, signs that even this area had not escaped the damnation that had stalked these passageways, but there were no zombies. He noticed that the red hatch beside the elevator on this level was standing open and peeked inside. Stairs.
The dead things went thataway.
Peter moved briskly, swiping the key card at every reader, opening the motorized blast doors for each magazine compartment. Lights were on inside as well, and his eyes roamed over racks of missiles, cluster munitions, smart bombs, “dumb” iron bombs, bunkers of ammunition for twenty-millimeter Gatling guns, torpedoes and chaff canisters. There was oh so much firepower aboard this floating tomb, and none of it interested him. Peter was seeking the holy trinity, the black-and-yellow symbol with three triangles that would signal he had arrived.
He found it on the last blast door on the left side. Beneath the radiation symbol was a warning that the area was restricted to a particular security clearance, and that unauthorized access would result in prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, section
blah, blah, blah
. He opened the door, half expecting to hear angels trumpeting and choirs of cherubs singing his praises. Instead he was hit by a puff of cool, dry air and found a rather small compartment lit with white fluorescents. The walls were covered in more warnings, alongside detailed safety procedures. A single missile rack occupied the left wall.
“Praise God,” he whispered.
There were forty of them cradled three high on padded steel racking, and they looked almost identical to the AGM 88 HARM, the high-speed anti-radiation missile carried by the Super Hornets, designed to home in on electronic transmissions coming from surface-to-air radar. Ship killers. Each was thirteen feet long, weighed 780 pounds, and had a range of sixty-six miles. Their smokeless, solid propellant rocket motors pushed them along at Mach two-plus, about 1,420 miles per hour, allowing them to cover that sixty-six miles in short order.
These beauties were different from the HARM. They had yellow noses and measured their punch in kilotons.
MARS. That was what the briefer at the Navy seminar called them. The god of war, blasphemous to even utter, as if there were any other than the one true God.
Who, in fact, was sitting on the top of the nuclear weapons rack. He appeared as a bitten and slashed Sherri, only dressed in the Air Force shrink’s uniform, complete with eyeglasses.
“Let’s get cracking, shall we?”
said God.
Brother Peter nodded and opened a tool locker, quickly seeing that it had everything he needed. Well, almost everything. Peter looked around and smiled when he saw the phone box on the wall beside the locker.
Now
he had everything. Using tools from the locker, Brother Peter opened the phone box and attached the stripped end of a coil of wire to a point inside, playing the wire out across the magazine. Then he used a battery-powered screwdriver to remove a curved panel from the skin of three missiles.
“You still got it,”
said God.
Peter ignored the voice, focusing on the work.
These were tactical nukes: short range with a low yield. The word
low
was laughable, considering that the Little Boy dropped on Hiroshima in 1945 had produced a yield between thirteen and eighteen kilotons, and each of these much smaller devices packed at least half that punch by themselves. Little Boy had been a simple gravity bomb, but a nuclear warhead could be attached to a variety of delivery systems: artillery shells, cruise missiles, the towering intercontinental ballistic missiles—ICBMs. In the 1960s, the American ICBM of choice had been the Jupiter and Thor, and during Peter’s time in Omaha, it had evolved into the Minuteman III.
At its foundation, however, a nuke was a nuke and they all worked the same. Enriched uranium assembled into a supercritical mass. It started a nuclear chain reaction that grew exponentially by compressing a subcritical sphere of material—plutonium-239—using chemical explosives. All were set off by an electrical charge and the resulting implosion was the stuff of nightmares: fatal burns, smoking cities, shadows of ash left on walls by incinerated children.
Hallelujah.
The federal government had not only trained him in how to handle these things but paid him for the privilege.
Glory Be. Three should be more than enough,
Peter thought.
“Three works for me,”
said God.
Peter got started.
• • •
X
avier quickly figured out how this worked. The stairwell was either the primary way down to the magazine or a backup in the event the elevator failed. Regardless, the stairs descended deck by deck into the lowest level of the ship, and there was a locked red hatch at every deck. The same key worked in them all, which at first surprised Xavier. He would have thought that, security in mind, a different key would be needed for each door. Then he realized that would be far too complicated, especially in the chaos of battle. This way, with a single key, any intruder would be delayed as he opened each hatch, or, if someone got careless and left one open, a fail-safe was created with additional sealed hatches. He was thankful for the simplicity of the one key.
The priest traveled down three decks without interference. Then he came to a red hatch where something was repeatedly thumping on the other side.
Xavier had no weapon. He was holding a key and there was no other way down.
He retreated up two flights to where he had seen a fire extinguisher hanging from a wall mount, then returned with it to the thumping. He inserted the key, took a few quick breaths, and hoisted the fire extinguisher as he swung open the hatch.
A rotting face snarled at him, and he caved it in with the red steel bottle. The creature staggered back a few feet, and another corpse with a crew cut pressed into the opening. Xavier smashed it in the forehead, and when it stumbled back, he smashed it again. It went down.
The first one came back at him, and Xavier used the fire extinguisher to shove the dead sailor against a wall. It craned its neck to snap at him. Using the bottle and the bulkhead as a hammer and anvil, Xavier pounded until the skull cracked and flattened. A hand gripped his ankle, and he turned on the crew-cut corpse as it tried to bite his ankle. A quick pounding sent it to join its shipmate.
Xavier hustled down the stairway, and when he reached the next hatch he found it standing open. Had these sailors been in the magazine and tried to flee? Had something caught them on the stairs?
Aware that there would likely be more, Father Xavier descended as quickly as he dared.